Mr. Independent

Bloomberg leaves the Republican Party

In the quaint and yet periodically relevant terms of the Gilded Age, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a captain of industry who turned into a Mugwump. With Bloomberg L.P., his empire of “financial information services,” he has become the forty-fourth richest person in America, worth at least five and a half billion dollars. But unlike the financial titans of the late nineteenth century, who made it a business practice to buy mayors (and governors and legislators), Bloomberg instead bought the mayoralty, spending almost a hundred and sixty million dollars of his own money on his two winning campaigns. Then, unlike the robber barons, who corrupted public officeholders to serve private or party interests, the Bloomberg administration has generally offered a model of nonpartisan good government, which was the ideal of that circle of disenchanted old-money Republicans whom Party stalwarts mockingly called Mugwumps, after the Algonquian word muggumquomp—meaning “war leader,” or “kingpin.”

In the Presidential election of 1884, the Mugwumps, fed up with corruption at the city, state, and national levels, refused to support the Republican machine candidate, James Blaine—a move that may have tilted the race to the Democratic winner, Grover Cleveland. Last week, Bloomberg ended his affiliation with the Republican Party, as he did seven years ago with the Democratic Party (thereby changing his political registration as many times as Hillary Clinton has had a geographical makeover and Rudolph Giuliani has torn up his marriage license). If Bloomberg’s media tease turns into the full-blown affair of an independent Presidential campaign, who would benefit? New York, for starters. Or, at least, the glittering constellation of news and entertainment companies, Wall Street firms, political consultants, civic boosters, paid gossips, columnists, pundits, publicists, and solipsists who feed—and in turn batten on—the impression that unless something happens in New York it doesn’t happen. Not even a Subway Series would exalt the city and annoy St. Louis or Boston quite as much as a three-way Presidential race between a senator, a mayor, and an ex-mayor from New York. The closest sports analogy might be the 1951 baseball playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants (decided by Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world”) for the right to lose to the Yankees in the World Series. But that comparison, too, falls short.

The forty per cent of the American electorate who regard themselves as Independents would also benefit. Their number has been growing in recent years, and they are increasingly joined in political sympathy by Republicans and Democrats who find their parties captive to a base, fringe, or interest group with which they have little in common. We are living through one of those recurring moments—1912, 1980, and 1992 were others—when disgust with the two big parties stirs a longing for an outsider of upright character, untainted by dirty money or political dealmaking. (Barack Obama and Giuliani are trying with some success to play the role from inside the parties, which might encourage Bloomberg to stay out.) This longing is almost always based on the illusion that compromise is separable from power, that political innocence should be the main qualification for office. The candidates Eugene Debs, John Anderson, and Ross Perot would probably not be remembered as stellar Presidents, but they forced both the Democrats and the Republicans to take public disillusionment more seriously. Bloomberg’s candidacy as a plain-speaking manager—and one who is socially liberal, fiscally competent, and temperamentally reassuring—would appeal to the millions of voters who are heartily sick of the spectacle of the permanent American campaign.

The last seven elected Presidents have come from the South or the West, making it almost an article of faith that no one from the Northeast (see under: Dukakis, Kerry) has a chance to win, or should even be considered American. This remarkable streak resulted from demographic change, the switch of the South from Democratic to Republican, and an ersatz populism perfected by millionaire politicians and encouraged by television. If a five-foot-seven divorced Jew with a nasal whine is taken seriously as a Presidential candidate, it would at the very least diminish the power of faux symbols in our political life; and a Clinton-Giuliani-Bloomberg race would so thoroughly explode the Sun Belt’s lock on the White House that an entirely new kind of politics might be possible, in which evolution is not at issue, no one has to pretend to like pork rinds, and the past tense of “drag” is “dragged.” It would also mark the end of New York’s longtime estrangement from the rest of the country and complete its post-September 11th return to being the great American city. After which Americans could start to resent New York again.

If Bloomberg runs, he might reach into his wallet for up to a half billion dollars, which lies somewhere between pocket change and a fairly large chunk of his fortune. The non-stop fund-raising that candidates for every office in Washington are obliged to do is degrading as well as corrupting, and it’s unlikely that legislation will ever stanch the money flow, because so few incumbents ever want to back it. Short of public financing, though, it is better for candidates to have to raise money from others—especially now that the Web and grassroots efforts have greatly increased the power of smaller donations—than to be able to buy the White House through their own business success. However well Bloomberg has run New York City or would run the United States, his money would be a profoundly undemocratic force in public life. The argument that it insulates him from the legal bribery of fund-raising glosses over the fact that billionaires have an impressive track record of venality. The White House should be available to human frailty in all tax brackets.

After Bloomberg’s announcement, Giuliani supporters were quick to underplay his success as mayor. Fred Siegel, a sometime Giuliani adviser and an admiring biographer, told the Times, “Bloomberg’s biggest accomplishments are not to screw up Giuliani’s legacy,” and on the New Republic Web site Siegel portrayed New York as a city kept prosperous and happy largely by Bloomberg’s personal spending. The spasm of panic from the Giuliani camp seems justifiable, since he and Bloomberg could end up in a scramble over the votes of moderate Republicans, but at the top of the list of those who would not benefit from a Bloomberg candidacy has to be Hillary Clinton. The 2008 election is the Democrats’ to lose, because Independents are moving their way. Some voters in both groups—especially the latter—might be tempted to leave behind the twenty rancorous years of Clintons and Bushes, to start fresh with a candidate who seems to have very little baggage other than an impressive record as mayor and suitcases full of money. ♦